The Internet is constantly growing in popularity, and more and more people are conducting business over the Internet, advertising their products and services by generating and sending electronic mass mailings. This electronic mail (e-mail) is usually unsolicited and regarded as nuisances by the recipients because they occupy much of the storage space needed for necessary and important data processing.
Therefore, it is highly desirable to have a filter system for screening and managing unwanted e-mails (and other electronic content, for that matter), while desired e-mails pass through the system to reach the recipients. Presently, there are products that are capable of filtering out unwanted e-mails, etc.
For example, one method exists which keeps an index list of all agents (e.g. companies, origination addresses, etc.) that generate mass unsolicited e-mails, and provides a mechanism to block any e-mail sent from each agent on the list. Another filter currently available employs filters which are based on predefined characteristics [e.g. words, uniform resource locators (URLs), patterns, etc.]. An incoming e-mail may thus be designated as an unwanted e-mail if, for example, it contains one or more of such characteristics.
In order to be effective, the aforementioned lists and/or characteristics must be constantly updated in order for the foregoing systems to be effective. Currently, these updates are streamed out to filtering systems at regular, predetermined intervals, and are streamed in their entirety. Unfortunately, this can result in considerable use of network bandwidth and/or other resources.
There is thus a need for overcoming these and/or other problems associated with the prior art.